Published: September 08, 2009 12:31 am      

BOOKS: Longtime NT resident Gwendolyn Molnar, 94, writes first book

Gwendolyn Molnar, 94, is no stranger to the range of names sometimes given to her fellow Newfoundlanders.

“Which is not right,” she said Friday, after volunteering one such moniker rhyming with the word newfie. “I think Newfoundlanders are very sharp people. They get to the very basics of stuff,” she said.

To be fair, Gwen is living proof of it.

Last Saturday, the Newfoundland native and longtime North Tonawanda resident hosted a book signing at Crestwood Commons in Wheatfield, one of several nursing homes where she has lived for decades since moving out of a home she and her late husband, restaurant owner Paul Molnar, had shared on Roncroft Drive.

The event Saturday marked the recent publication of her first book, “Tapestry of Yesteryear.”

“I just decided, for my family’s sake, I wanted to leave something to remind them of how primitive things were then, as opposed to today,” she said.

Molnar was born Gwendolyn Poole in 1915 on Pilley’s Island, on the rugged maritime province’s east coast — a place out in the Atlantic Ocean beyond already far-flung places like Maine, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. It was Britain’s oldest colony before joining with the rest of Canada in 1949.

Perhaps the previous isolation made it hard for U.S. and Canadian servicemen to understand Newfoundland’s primitive charms. According to some accounts, while each were stationed there during World War II, the jokes just sort of followed.

But for Molnar as a little girl, the isolation was a virtue.

Her home, a small white boxy structure built right up to the edge of the water, is pictured on the book’s back cover.

“It’s mostly about how life was in those days. It was so primitive,” she said. “And my father lived on hunting and fishing. Our house was built on the water. It was a wonderful childhood, you know that.”

Finding a place to start the book, she explained, was easy.

“I wrote about when I was first born. I was born dead and they worked on me and put me in another room and here I was — they put me in cold water, they put in some warm water and I emitted a faint squawk and I’ve been squawking ever since,” she said.

Molnar said she began writing and researching the book about six years ago, with encouragement from her niece, Janice Wells, an accomplished Canadian author and journalist, and another cousin.

What resulted is an autobiography focusing on Molnar’s own childhood as part of the small community living on Pilley’s Island, home to just 600 other souls, she said.

Now as an author, she admitted it’s exciting to be in the limelight.

“It’s all anyone’s talking about, fame at last,” she said from a common room in the senior living center ... I’m a little old for that, you know. I was always shy and retiring, but I guess I don’t have to be, anymore.”

The book includes a series of moments, scenes Molnar said she can still vividly recall from her youth, even at an age where some more recent events are getting harder to recall.

Like fishing for capelin, a staple food in the sustenance lifestyle of islanders, off the veranda of her home.

“We loved the smell but most people didn’t,” she said of the little fish. “And you know what we’d do, we’d scoop out the eye and that would be the bait for the next fish,” she said.

She recalled her father had not gone to school. His parents bore the same surname, Poole, as the city in England they left for North America.

Molnar, however, gave examples of the kind of uncanny knowledge her parents gained throughout their lives. She recalls her mother reciting a seemingly endless supply of poetry, while little Gwen got her hair braided nearby the stove. Then there was the way a tight community can sometimes provide its own education. The community was definitely close-knit.

“Everybody was looking for an excuse for a party,” she said. “The birthday of a child, whatever. We would bake up a meal and we would play cards all night long. It was so much fun ... It’s all in my book, you know.”

By the time war broke out, she had completed the 10 years of schooling available to her, and as she puts it, went out to do one of the only two options available to a young woman at the time. She became a nurse.

“I didn’t want to be a teacher. I thought nursing was a little more varied, with the different things you got to do,” she said. “In my day there were only two things you could do, either teaching or nursing. There was none of this fancy business.”

She worked alongside another woman from North Tonawanda while working as a nurse on an Army base in Newfoundland. The co-worker suggested she move to North Tonawanda, where she relocated after the war and met Paul when she was just 23 years old and working as a nurse at DeGraff Memorial Hospital.

“Wherever I go, I adapt to the atmosphere, but I just love being who I am — a Newfoundlander,” she said.

Molnar has two grown children living in Akron, N.Y., and Texas. Her husband had operated Molnar’s restaurant on River Road and Wheatfield Street prior to his death.

Contact reporter Neale Gulley at 693-1000, ext. 114.